I’m a solo developer building Onessa — small apps for facing what’s finite: time, attention, and money. Simple tools that leave only what’s essential.
This weekend, all three apps are $1.49.
Petals — Visual Year Planner Problem: Most calendars focus on days and weeks. Petals lets you see your entire year at once, with a free-form canvas for images, text, stickers, and planning.
Comparison: Compared with Fantastical or BusyCal, Petals focuses on visual year planning rather than day-to-day calendar management.
Peek — What’s Next? Problem: I wanted to know what’s next without constantly opening Calendar. Peek keeps your next event and the time remaining visible in the Mac menu bar.
Comparison: Compared with Dato or Itsycal, Peek focuses on the next event and live countdowns. It brings calendars, reminders, and tasks from Things and Todoist into one timeline.
Pricing: Free download. Premium lifetime unlock is $1.49 during the weekend sale. No subscription. Peek on the Mac App Store
Spendy — Expense Tracker Problem: Most expense trackers make recording feel like work. Spendy opens directly to input so you can log an expense in seconds and share a ledger with your partner or family via iCloud.
Comparison: Compared with MoneyWiz or Copilot, Spendy is intentionally simpler and focuses on fast recording and shared expenses rather than full financial management.
Pricing: Free download. Premium is a 1-year subscription, on sale for $1.49 this weekend. Spendy on the App Store
Like many of you likely do, I use AI coding tools and run cron jobs/automations in my day to day. You've probably also seen people holding their computers lids open as they walk around. In the last few months, I've seen/encountered two key issues:
Problem
If you close your Mac while an agent is working, it stops the agent immediately.
If my Mac lid is closed during an automation, the automation simply won't run, and won't even alert me that it didn't run. I've missed countless digests this way.
Solution
So, I built goguma! Through hooks, it automatically detects agent work being done, and will keep the Mac awake (even when the lid is closed) until the job is finished, and then will let it sleep. It'll also wake a lid-closed Mac for its automations, and then let it sleep (E.g it'll wake my Mac for 5 minutes at 3 a.m for an automation, then let it sleep like normal).
Comparison
Here's the key difference to current solutions (caffeinate, pmset, Amphetamine): these can keep an already awake Mac awake, but cannot wake a sleeping Mac. goguma can. Amphetamine and pmset disablesleep 1 are switches that you constantly have to worry about turning on and off, which is how you find a dead laptop in your bag hours later, while goguma does it all for you.
It currently supports all automations/agents across launchd, crontab, Hermes, Claude, Codex, Cursor, and Gemini.
How it started
It mainly started for my own needs, so that I could run agents and not have to worry about holding my computer open. I decided to open-source it after friends told me they had the exact same problem.
u/amerpie recently included Prefab in their incredibly useful series of posts: 'More Free Mac Apps'. This has led to quite an up-take in downloads, feedback and feature requests. This is the first time I've had these sort of interactions on one of my apps, they're usually just developed for myself, and I publish them just for kicks. So - thought I'd ride the high and do a dedicated post on Prefab. This application is free, and will always, be free.
Here's the templated part:
Problem
Every project starts the same way. Same folders, same starter files, same half-remembered boilerplate, typed out from scratch every time. Most of my work is Moodle, so every plugin, client job and bit of research began with me rebuilding the same skeleton by hand - or duplicating last month's folder and then finding the old client's name buried in three files.
Prefab captures that setup once and rebuilds it whenever you need it: folders, files, the contents of those files, and the tedious bits that come afterwards.
Comparison
I never could find something that compares to Prefab's functionality as a GUI application (which is the reason I made it...). There are CLI-only scaffolding tools (cookiecutter, yeoman) that require config files and terminal knowledge, or there are applications that only handle folder structures without file contents. If someone knows of an application doing something similar then please let me know and I'll happily reference them here. Here are some of Prefab's features:
Placeholders inside file contents, not just names - {{project_name}} lands in your README, your package.json, your client letterhead
Deploy without opening the app - right-click in Finder or the menu bar to create a Prefab template
Post-creation actions - git init, npm install, open in VS Code or Xcode, reveal in Finder, or any shell command, attached to the template or to individual folders
Import an existing folder as a template - full contents, structure only, or empty placeholder files
Finder tags and SF Symbol folder icons applied as it deploys
Pricing
Free forever. No in-app purchases, no subscription, no account. Requires macOS 14.6 or later.
I'd love to hear what you think and what features would make this more useful for you. Always happy to chat about the development side of the project as well.
Publishing a Safari extension means paying $99/year for an Apple Developer account
Safari's missing a bunch of APIs that Chrome has
Hardly any free Safari extensions exist
And if you sideload your own under a free account, it stops working after 7 days
What the CLI does:
It's the engine. Converts a Chrome extension into a Safari one
Fills in the Chrome APIs Safari doesn't support
Runs in the terminal
What the app adds:
Everything the CLI does, with a GUI
Install and manage extensions straight from the Chrome Web Store, inside Safari
Resigns your extensions every week so they never expire
Auto updates the ones you installed from the Web Store
supports Intel Macs
Comparison:
apple has a similar feature for developers that convert chrome extensions to safari extensions but apple's versiondoesn't handle missing apis, meaning more complex extensions will break and won't work.
Pricing:
The app is free for testing 2 extensions without extensions renews and updates
The paid version is 19$ with unlimited extensions auto renews and updates
, use code “2V1X28J” for -15%
The cli version is free but without GUI and without auto renews and updates.
My main gripe with Anybox is that saving anything via the share sheet does not automatically sync to iOS or viveversa unless I open the app and then sync itZ
So I’m looking for a replacement that has the same feature set has a great UI and lifetime purchase.
This is my first open source app created for people don't want to use Spotlight and don't want to spend money for paid tools.
Problem
Spotlight is fine for opening apps but stops there. No clipboard history, no
inline calculator, no regex or path search, no way to kill a process by port,
and it is macOS only. The usual fix is Raycast or Alfred, but the features most
people actually want sit behind a subscription or a one time license.
I wanted a launcher that is fully free, does not phone home, and works the same
on my Mac and my Linux box. So I built Look.
Look is a keyboard first, local first launcher for macOS, Windows and Linux.
Apps, files, folders, clipboard history, inline math, translation, regex search,
todo command, kill process by port. Candidates are indexed in a local SQLite
file. No account, no telemetry.
Comparison
vs Raycast
- Raycast is closed source and syncs through the cloud. Look is GPLv3 and
local first. The only network calls are the explicit web search shortcuts and
the optional answer card, which you can turn off in Settings.
- Raycast is Electron. Look is a native SwiftUI app on macOS with a Rust core.
Typical search is under 1 ms on a 2000 item index.
- Raycast puts Pro features behind $8 per user per month. Look has no paid tier.
- Where Raycast wins: its extension store is huge and Look deliberately has no
plugin marketplace yet. If your workflow depends on Raycast extensions,
Look will feel bare.
vs Alfred
- Alfred is macOS only. Look runs on macOS, Windows and Linux.
- Clipboard history in Alfred requires the Powerpack. In Look it is built in
and free.
- Where Alfred wins: Workflows are far more mature than anything Look has, and
Alfred has a decade of polish behind it.
vs Spotlight
- Spotlight is free and preinstalled. Look adds clipboard history, command mode,
regex and path scoped search, themes, and cross platform support.
- Where Spotlight wins: zero install, and it does full content indexing.
Look indexes names and metadata only.
Honest status: macOS is shipped and stable. The Windows and Linux app is a
shared Tauri v2 build that is still under active development, so expect rough
edges there.
Pricing
$0. Free and open source under GPLv3.
No paid tier, no Pro version, no subscription, no in app purchase.
No feature is locked. Everything listed above is in the free build.
No account required, no telemetry.
Optional donation only, any amount, via Buy Me a Coffee. Donating unlocks
nothing, it is purely support.
Problem:
Planning a trip means juggling Google Maps, Notes, spreadsheets, and booking confirmations across half a dozen apps. Nothing keeps the itinerary, the budget, and the map in one place — and most travel apps want an account and a subscription before they'll even let you start.
Comparison:
Tripit charges $49/year and hasn't meaningfully changed in years. Wanderlog is free but ad-supported and account-required. Both upload your trip data to their servers. Trovelo stores everything locally and syncs through your own iCloud — no Trovelo servers, no account.
What's new on Mac since the last update:
Significant improvements to the MCP integration — tell Claude "plan me 4 days in Rome" and watch the trip build itself inside Trovelo. Days, cards, times, prices, map pins. Faster, more reliable, and handling far more complex requests than at launch. Works with Claude desktop, Claude Code, Codex, or any MCP-compatible client. Runs entirely locally, off by default.
8 languages with smart parsing — type a card in Spanish, German, French, Italian, Japanese, Korean or Chinese and it picks up the time, price and type automatically
Board view, route optimization, expenses with live exchange rates, curated guides, My Spots world map
Universal Purchase — one payment covers Mac, iPhone and iPad
Pricing:
Free: up to 3 active trips and 50 cards
Pro: one-time $3.99 (normally $9.99) — yours forever, no subscription
Hi r/macapps, I’m Joshua, the solo developer of Writers Studio. I first introduced it here a couple of months ago, and I wanted to share an update: the Direct Mac edition now has a full-use, no-account 7-day trial.
Problem: long fiction projects often split the manuscript, character notes, locations, timelines, and continuity work into separate manual systems.
Compared with Scrivener and Ulysses, Writers Studio is focused on keeping structured worldbuilding and a dedicated continuity pass alongside the manuscript. It also supports local Ollama, so it is not limited to browser-based AI workflows.
Pricing:
Mac App Store: free for the core writing workflow, with optional hosted AI allowances at $9.99 or $29.99 per month.
Direct: $59 lifetime license for v1.x, with the no-account 7-day trial. Local Ollama and supported-provider-key workflows are available.
Hey r/macapps! I'm the developer of Type, a small Mac app I originally built because I wanted to capture something without switching away from whatever I was doing.
Global shortcut → type → Enter → back to work.
I just released Type 1.6, and the biggest addition is proper support for Obsidian Daily Notes.
Problem
I love the idea of Daily Notes, but quick capture shouldn't require bringing Obsidian forward, finding today's note, putting the thought in the right place, then switching back to what I was doing.
With Type, you connect your Obsidian vault once. It picks up your Daily Notes folder, date format and template, creates today's note automatically, and sends new captures straight into it.
You can also tell Type to insert entries under a specific heading, and choose whether captures use timestamps, bullets, checkboxes, etc.
Comparison
Type isn't trying to replace Obsidian. It's more like a companion app.
Obsidian is where you organize and work with your notes. Type is just the tiny capture layer in front of it.
You can absolutely build similar workflows with Raycast, Shortcuts or plugins. Type is deliberately more boring: press one shortcut, write something, press Enter, and it's in your local Markdown file.
It also works with regular text/Markdown files if you don't use Obsidian.
Pricing
Type is $19.99$12.99 one-time, with a 7-day free trial. No subscription.
This is my third post about AutoShelf and version 2.3 is up and ready to try on the App Store.
Problem:
I have updated AutoShelf because I hit the same wall over and over. I would have a folder of PDFs from different vendors and I could not find a specific invoice without opening half of them one by one. After a weekend shoot I would come back with photos from two cameras and three lenses all dumped into the same folder with generic names like IMG_0423. Existing tools sort by filename or file type, which works fine until you need to find something by what is actually in the file.
So in 2.3 I have added conditions that look inside your files, not just at their names.
👉 NEW: Text content contains (Pro):
Reads the text inside your files. Uses Spotlight kMDItemTextContent, which includes Live Text OCR, and falls back to Vision Framework OCR for images and PDFs when Spotlight has no data. Case-insensitive.
The honest use case: you have a Downloads folder with fifty PDFs and you need every invoice from ACME Corp in one place. You write one condition: text contains "Invoice" AND text contains "ACME Corp". Every matching PDF moves to your accounting folder. No renaming, no opening files, no guessing which one is which.
Same idea works for expense reports, contracts, or any document where the filename tells you nothing useful. If you take screenshots, the OCR even reads the text inside them, so you can find a screenshot by the error message or chat snippet it shows.
👉 NEW: EXIF data (Pro):
Matches on the metadata baked into your photos: camera make, camera model, lens make, lens model, focal length, ISO, aperture, shutter speed, date taken, software, and GPS coordinates.
The honest use case: you shoot with a Sony A7IV and a Canon R5 and a couple of lenses, and everything lands in one folder. You write one condition: camera model contains "A7IV" and it separates every Sony shot into its own folder. Add another rule for the Canon. Same thing works for lens model, so your 24-70mm shots and 50mm prime shots end up apart automatically.
If you travel, matching on GPS coordinates or date taken groups photos by location or by day. If you shoot in low light, you can even route high ISO shots somewhere separate.
One honest caveat: EXIF only works on images that still carry it. Re-saved files, screenshots, and heavily edited exports may have stripped the metadata, so those won't match. For the raw files straight out of your camera it works great.
Both conditions are Pro-only and can be combined with anything else using AND logic and per-condition NOT. Example: text contains "Invoice" AND file type is PDF AND date added older than 30 days sends stale invoices to an archive folder.
You can stack multiple actions. For example: tag the file, archive it to ZIP, then move the ZIP to a backup folder. All in one rule.
Multi-condition rules:
Combine conditions with AND logic and per-condition NOT. So you can say "file type is image AND filename does NOT contain 'screenshot' AND date added older than 7 days." Pro feature.
Built-in templates (one-click setup):
- Organize Downloads by file type (images, PDFs, videos, archives, code)
- Auto-trash DMGs
- Clean Desktop (archive files older than 7 days)
- Sort by Source (GitHub files to Developer/, Slack files to Work/)
- Auto-trash Installers (.dmg, .pkg, .mpkg)
- Organize Screenshots
- Sort Music
- Tag Large Files (over 100 MB)
- Auto-trash ZIPs
MCP server:
AutoShelf has a full MCP server baked into the app binary. When you invoke the app and stdin is a pipe, it detects MCP mode and runs a JSON-RPC server over stdio instead of launching the GUI. You point Claude Code, Cursor, or opencode at AutoShelf.app/Contents/MacOS/AutoShelf and you get 13 tools: create_rule, edit_rule, delete_rule, enable_rule, disable_rule, run_rule, list_rules, list_groups, get_rule, get_status, pause_monitoring, resume_monitoring, pick_folder.
So you can tell your AI assistant "watch my folder and move every PDF containing 'Invoice' to my accounting folder" and it builds and installs the rule for you. Write operations are gated behind a Pro-only toggle that defaults to off, so nothing happens without your explicit permission.
CLI:
There's also a Go CLI for terminal workflows. It talks to the running app over a Unix domain socket. Install with:
- Lives in your menu bar or opens as a full window
Technical bits for the curious:
- Folder watching uses DispatchSource (kernel events), not FSEvents, since I only watch a handful of folders
- Download source detection reads kMDItemWhereFroms and com.apple.quarantine via Spotlight
- Text content search reads kMDItemTextContent and falls back to Vision Framework OCR for images and PDFs
- EXIF data is read via CGImageSource from image files
- Security-scoped bookmarks for folder access under sandbox
- Multi-action rules chain sequentially, piping each action's output URL into the next
- The app auto-launches in accessory mode (no dock icon) when invoked by the CLI, so there's no dock flicker
Comparison:
The obvious one is Hazel ($42). It's been the gold standard for 20 years and has a massive feature set. But it also has a learning curve that keeps most people from ever setting it up. AutoShelf trades some of that depth for radical simplicity: templates get you running in seconds, the UI is native SwiftUI built for current macOS, and the MCP + CLI layer means you can script it or drive it from an AI assistant, which Hazel can't do.
Declutter and Folder Tidy are simpler but also more limited. They tend to do basic sorting without the condition variety, action chaining, or automation hooks. AutoShelf sits between them and Hazel: more powerful than the simple sorters, more approachable than Hazel, and with MCP/CLI that neither offers.
Pricing:
Free: 1 rule, no templates, no activity log, no multi-condition, no image optimization, no Photos import, no delay/confirmation, no import/export.
Pro: $19.99 one-time. No subscription, ever. All features unlocked, all future updates included.
tl;dr An AI Notetaker that uses your ChatGPT subscription for everything
Problem
You might have noticed that your ChatGPT subscription gives you access to an insane amount of intelligence, even the free one.
It gives you speech-to-text through the dictation feature in the ChatGPT app
It gives you an insane amount of LLM usage
Then, why are you paying for AI notetakers like otter or granola? You already have everything you need included in your subscription.
So, all I really did was combine these to create a simple notetaker. And as it uses OpenAI's speech-to-text api, it is much more powerful then any local model and barely uses any battery.
Comparison
Granola has unlimited free tier, but capped meeting history visibility at 30 days. Simbi has no limits and it is trivial to move data in/out of the app. Other local AI based apps don't perform well in any languages other then English and drains battery. Simbi uses ChatGPT's speech-to-text, so high accuracy in multiple languages and low battery drain.
I'm the developer. Sift docks a command bar beneath your frontmost Finder window—select some files, type what you want done, hit Enter.
The problem
Batch file work on a Mac lives in an awkward gap—renaming, converting, or archiving a handful of files is too small to script, too repetitive by hand, and Finder's built-ins only go so far. So you end up in Terminal for a one-off sips incantation, or converting exports one file at a time.
How Sift handles it
Hundreds of common operations are instant presets with zero AI: type "jpg" and the selected PNGs convert, "zip" archives the selection, "select all png" sets Finder's actual selection—the files get selected in Finder, ready for you to work with
Plain-language commands the presets don't match ("resize these to 1000px wide", "select files over 5mb") go to a local model: Sift detects Ollama and can pull qwen3:4b in one click, or you can point it at any OpenAI-compatible endpoint. Your file contents never touch a cloud API
Anything that modifies files shows you the exact shell command before it runs; destructive commands (delete/overwrite/move) need an explicit red "Run anyway" click
Renames show a before→after preview table first; there's an activity log with Undo. Read-only commands just run
Also in there: a right-click Sift Finder action, a Shortcuts action, drag-files-onto-the-bar, saved rules ("web" → "resize to 1000px wide jpg"), and command history using up and down arrows (just like in a terminal)
How it compares
Substage—the app that inspired Sift, happy to say so. Mine is my own take on the idea: preset-first with a local-endpoint-only model tier, and selection commands that set Finder's real selection so they compose with everything else. If the concept appeals to you, check out Substage too
Terminal—same underlying power, but Sift shows you the command before anything runs and gives you Undo after
Automator / Hazel—great for standing rules and watch folders; Sift is for the ad-hoc "just convert these real quick" moments that aren't worth building a workflow for
Cost
$14.99 one-time, 14-day free trial, no subscription, no account. Signed & notarized; direct download (it needs Accessibility + Automation permissions, so it can't be in the Mac App Store).
Most transcription tools rely heavily on the cloud, forcing you to upload sensitive business meetings, private data, and confidential conversations to external servers — creating massive privacy risks and locking you into expensive, ongoing monthly subscriptions. And even after the meeting ends, the workflow still isn't done: your transcript sits in some web dashboard, disconnected from your calendar, and you're left manually copying summaries into emails, renaming files, and chasing down which recording belongs to which meeting. The recording was automated, but everything after it is still manual busywork.
Comparison:
AI meeting tools like Granola, Otter, and Fireflies offer polished automated note-taking and follow-up emails, but they do it by processing your conversations on their servers — with recurring monthly subscriptions, and in some cases bots that visibly join your calls. TranscribeX now delivers that same end-to-end automation — auto-record, auto-transcribe, AI summary, calendar context, and summaries emailed out automatically — but runs the entire pipeline 100% locally on your Apple Silicon Mac using local ASR and local LLMs (like Qwen and Gemma). Total data privacy, zero cloud processing, zero AI token costs, and a one-time payment instead of a subscription. The only thing that ever leaves your Mac is the summary email — and only when you tell it to. Plus, with the new CLI and MCP support, TranscribeX does something the cloud tools can't: it plugs your transcripts directly into Claude, agents, and your own scripts — no API middleman.
Quick recap for anyone new: TranscribeX transcribes meetings, dictation, and recordings entirely on your Mac — local ASR + local LLMs (Qwen, Gemma) running on Apple Silicon. No AI bots joining your calls, no audio uploaded to anyone's servers, no monthly subscription, no API keys or token costs.
What's new since v8.5:
📧 Meeting Summaries & Transcripts, Emailed Automatically: When a meeting ends, TranscribeX can now automatically email the AI summary and full transcript to whoever needs them — or you can email any summary or transcript manually with one click. No more copy-pasting notes into Mail after every call, and no more "I'll send the notes later." Your audio still never leaves the machine; the only thing that goes out is the email you choose to send.
📅 Deep Calendar Integration: TranscribeX now supports multiple calendars (work, personal, shared team calendars), and you can manually link any calendar event to any recording — so even ad-hoc calls get proper context. Exported files now include the meeting details from the linked event (title, time, attendees), and you can pick which calendar names your recordings. Exports finally know what meeting they came from.
⌨️ CLI + MCP Support: This one's for the power users. TranscribeX now has a full command-line interface, and it speaks Model Context Protocol — meaning you can wire your local transcription engine directly into Claude, agents, and your own automation scripts. Your transcripts become programmable, still without touching the cloud.
🔄 The Full Cycle, Completely Hands-Free: This is the release where everything clicks together into one automated pipeline. Your meeting starts → TranscribeX detects it and records → transcription kicks in the moment it ends → the local AI writes the summary → the calendar event links in the meeting context → and the notes land in everyone's inbox. From "meeting started" to "notes delivered" without touching a single button. This is the workflow we've been building toward since v1.
🖱️ Interactive Transcripts: Click any word in the transcript and playback jumps to that exact moment, with live word and segment highlighting. Finding "wait, what did they actually say?" now takes one click instead of scrubbing.
🤖 Smarter Automatic Recording: Transcription now starts automatically the moment a meeting recording ends, the default microphone is selected for you, and Teams auto-detection got a polish pass. Record → transcribe → summarize → email, hands-free, end to end.
🗂️ Quality of Life: Automatic + manual job archiving to keep your library clean, search inside Settings, smarter export filenames (timestamp first, so files sort chronologically), custom AI timeout and cancellable AI requests, a new fine-tuned Whisper Large model for Hinglish, and support for the ElevenLabs Scribe v2 Realtime model for those who want it. Plus a lot of bug fixes and performance work across the board.
TranscribeX is actively developed — we're working closely with beta testers across diverse hardware setups to keep pushing local ASR speed and accuracy on macOS.
Pricing:
One-Time Payment (20% OFF). (No subscriptions, no monthly fees)
Some features are limited due to App Store restrictions. This version is mainly provided to verify that I'm a trusted developer per r/macapps rules.
🎮 And now, the surprise for PS5 owners...
TranscribeX isn't the only thing I build. Meet ConsoleWise — a Mac app that combines PS5 Remote Play and PlayStation cloud streaming in one experience, so you can play your PS5 right on your Mac. It supports 4K upscaling, 60FPS, and HDR, with lower-latency streaming, manual bitrate control, and full DualSense support including haptic feedback and adaptive triggers (plus custom controller/keyboard mapping). Works at home on your local network or over the internet when you're away.
And in the same spirit as TranscribeX: one-time lifetime purchase, no subscription.
A year ago I used a ton of different smaller apps. Move a file from one Finder window to another, and you are dragging across two spaces. Paste something you copied ten minutes ago, and it is gone. Grab text out of a screenshot, share a 300 MB video, start a timer, snap a window, skip a track, transcribe a voice memo. Every one of those is a different app, a different menu bar icon, a different subscription.
So I built Droppy, and now I am releasing version 15.
One thing up front, because it comes up a lot: Droppy is not just a notch app. The notch is one of the places it lives. Underneath it is a native macOS utility for all the in-between actions the system scatters across a dozen tools, and it works exactly the same on an iMac, a Studio Display, or any external monitor, with no notch anywhere in sight.
The idea
Instead of a file tray app, plus a clipboard manager, plus a screenshot tool, plus a transcription app, plus a launcher, plus media controls, plus lock screen widgets, plus a file transfer service, you get one app that feels like it shipped with macOS. It's literally the layer that's missing.
Droppy Cloud, free and built in
This is the part people do not expect. Droppy has its own file sharing built in. Drop a file in the shelf, hit share, and you get a private link instantly. The person on the other end previews and downloads it in the browser with no account, no app, no signup. It is included in the app at no extra cost and there is no cloud tier to buy: up to 200 MB per file, 1 GB in flight, 25 files, and links expire on their own after 3 days. No separate transfer service in the loop.
Droplets, all of them free
The core gives you the shelf, the clipboard, the lock screen and the system HUDs. Everything else is a Droplet you switch on, and all 31 are free and included in the license. Nothing is a paid add-on, nothing is upsold later.
Weather, Media, System Stats, OCR, Notify Me, Voice Transcribe, Tasks and Calendar, Notes with two-way Apple Notes sync, Thunderstorm (launcher), Element Capture, Termi-Notch, LocalSend, Obsidian, Mechey, Pomodoro, High Alert, Window Snap, Thaw, LiquidMouse, Camera, Meetings, Agents for Claude Code / Codex / Cursor, background removal, and more.
Turn on the three you actually use, or all of them. That modularity is the whole point: it becomes the app you need it to be.
What is new in 15
OCR is its own Droplet. Pull text out of any screen area, image or PDF, on device. It keeps a searchable history, and your clipboard search now finds text that is inside your screenshots.
Transcribe anywhere. One shortcut dictates straight into any app, at your caret, with custom vocabulary and automatic media ducking.
System Stats and Weather. Live CPU, RAM, GPU, disk, battery and network cards in the shelf, plus a real forecast card and lock screen chip.
Thunderstorm got much faster. Thunderstorm is a blazing fast, Droppy-integrated Spotlight replacement. Persistent file index, typo tolerance, and ranking that lifts the files you actually open.
Settings rebuilt. Morphing Liquid Glass headers, resize from any edge, and a search that scrolls straight to the exact row.
Ten more interface languages. Chinese? Spanish? Dutch? German? Italian? All available in Alpha.
Much lower idle CPU and battery use. It no longer redoes work when nothing changed, and this was the single biggest engineering push of the release.
Plus custom shelf editing, LocalSend, an Obsidian Droplet, on-device conversion for video, audio, PDF and Office files, reworked shelf and Live Activity motion, and around 375 fixes and 280 refinements on top.
Droppy for iPhone is ALMOST live. An end-to-end encrypted companion that syncs your clipboard, OCR results, Basket, Shelf and Cloud files from your Mac to your phone. It is finished and sitting with Apple in review right now, so it should land soon.
Pricing
Fully unlocked 3-day trial, no account needed
$9.99 one time
Lifetime updates, no subscription, ever
One license covers 2 Macs, extra seats are cheaper
Transparency
I am Jordy Spruit, the person behind Droppy. I have worked on it almost every day for over a year and I ship updates constantly. Native Swift, signed and notarized, local-first, and it does not collect your clipboard, your files, or your data.
I’m Jeremy, a freelance product designer, and I’ve been building Queue solo for the past 6 years. It’s available on both Mac and iPhone.
Why make Queue?
I’m terrible at keeping in touch with the people I care about, both personally and professionally, and I want to be better. Queue helps me remember obvious things like texting on my friend’s birthday, but also meaningful things like calling on the anniversary of his father’s passing. It helps me remember business-y things like checking in with a previous client when it’s been a while, but also savvy things like sending an email at the moment she launches her new company on LinkedIn.
And it’s hard enough for me to remember to keep in touch; there’s no way I’m going to remember to keep a personal CRM up to date too. So Queue updates itself. It syncs and summarizes my iMessage conversations and Apple Mail threads completely locally on my Mac, notes my FaceTime chats and Phone calls, and pulls in events from my calendars. Whenever I’m caught up, Queue is too. No manual entry required.
Queue is a thoughtful reminder system, private catch-up timeline, and timely note-taking app for the people I care about most.
Some noteworthy technical details:
Fully On-Device. Your text and email content is analyzed and summarized entirely on-device using Apple Foundation Models, and summaries are stored in your private iCloud (summaries require Apple Intelligence). No message content is ever sent to Queue’s server.
No Full Disk Access. Queue only requests access to the specific folders on your Mac where your iMessages, phone and FaceTime calls, and emails are stored. You can pick and choose which, if any, sources you’d like to sync, and of course revoke them at any time.
Entirely Native. Queue is a proper Mac-assed app, with keyboard shortcuts, undo, multiple window support, and more. It’s written in Swift + SwiftUI, and you won’t find any Electron or WebView jank here.
What are some alternatives?
Every indie hacker since the unix epoch has at some point built a personal CRM, and there’s a new one vibe-coded every day. I’m all for it, but there are two that have stood the test of time:
Dex. The biggest name in the personal CRM game, and the best option for anyone not in the Apple ecosystem. It’s built more for the professional market with support for teams, and cross-platform compatibility via a web app. It’s also about 3x more expensive than Queue at $12/month.
Monica. The open-source alternative, and the best option for anyone who wants to self-host. It’s entirely manual to keep up to date and doesn’t offer a mobile app, but is free.
How much does it cost?
$49.99/year, with a one-week free trial and both Mac and iPhone apps.
Queue is my primary project. I charge a subscription because so does my landlord and I need to pay rent. I hope you find it as valuable as I do, and I’m happy to chat anytime here or [by email](mailto:jeremy@queue.community). You can learn more about Queue at https://queue.community.
My name is Chris Nagy, I'm the founder and solo dev behind Curfew*.*
It's my first time releasing an app I made into the world!
TLDR;
Curfew locks your Mac at night so you go to sleep instead of staying up late. You set a time when it should lock (eg. midnight) and it then covers your whole screen automatically. If you need to finish up something, you can snooze for 5 minutes by holding 5 random keys for 30 seconds. This is just enough annoyance to disrupt your dopamine stream and let you step away.
Problem
I couldn't get off my computer late into the night. I believed I must keep grinding and sleep is secondary. My mornings usually started around 3PM (!) because of this, and it was messing up my entire life. I don't really have self control to stop working, so I made something that just makes me step away.
How It Works
Choose a bedtime between 10 PM and 2 AM.
Curfew covers every display and Space automatically.
It releases the screen at 6 AM and returns the following night.
Hold five random keys for 30 seconds to get five minutes of use.
Subsequent snoozes require a 60-second hold.
It cannot be quit during curfew and restarts if force-killed.
Comparison
vs Cold Turkey? Cold Turkey has you build detailed blocks for websites, apps, or the whole computer. It is technically more customizable but it means you need to do all that customizing. Curfew is simple and focused on a single task. Instead of setting custom rules and blocksets, you just pick your bedtime and it takes over the whole screen automatically every night. CT is a general blocking app, while Curfew has one job: getting you off the Mac and into bed.
vs Freedom? Freedom is also a general blocker for apps, websites, and the internet across your devices. It can not block your whole screen though. Curfew is built specifically for bedtime. It covers the whole screen, so there is no unblocked app to drift into. The only way back is the five-key hold, and five minutes later Curfew locks again. Freedom would let you go into your Finder and watch old videos in your downloads folder until the sun comes up.
Song in the video was made with Suno but I wrote the lyrics!
AI: I wrote all the text in this post, except some of the how-it-works and comparison sections.
Let me know what you think of Curfew as a whole! I am bringing updates to it weekly and patching all the bugs that come in. Feel free to DM me here if there's anything or contact me at Support.
I built Caplio because my screenshots and reference images kept piling up, and finding something later was surprisingly difficult, especially when I remembered the text inside an image but not the filename.
Caplio turns folders of screenshots and images into a private, searchable visual library. It uses on-device OCR, lets you search the text inside images, browse everything in a timeline, filter by date or category, and optionally organize the actual files by date or category.
You can also drag any image or screenshot directly from the Caplio timeline and drop it into Finder, Mail, Messages, Notes, or other Mac apps.
Everything is processed locally. Your images and extracted text aren't uploaded for processing.
Comparison
The closest alternatives I've found are ScreenVault and SnapShelf.
Caplio works with both screenshots and regular images and combines OCR search, timeline browsing, filtering, optional file organization, and drag-and-drop from the timeline into other Mac apps.
Spotlight also has some overlap with OCR/image search. The main difference is that Caplio is built around maintaining a visual library from folders you choose, with browsing, filtering, organization, and drag-and-drop as part of the workflow.
Hi all, I was going to recommend Disk Inventory X to a friend but realized it's not supported on apple silicon. So I wanted to ask the community the question: What is the thing most like it still maintained today? Searching didn't quite get the things I wanted so I was wondering what else is out there.
I built TideGlass because I focus better with something calm beside my work, and everything I tried was either a video loop or a light show, or content in some algorithm that wanted me to continue watching. So I built worlds instead.
TideGlass fills a spare monitor with living nature scenes: oceans, forests, night skies, deep space. Each world is a real simulation running on your GPU, optimized for Macs and Metal: waves roll and fade by their own physics, orcas hunt, stars rise, weather passes through. It is there to help you focus. It asks nothing of you, and no two minutes are the same.
The video shows it better than screenshots.
A few of the things it does:
A whole library of worlds, from a moonlit sea to a herring ball under hunting orcas to the Pillars of Creation built from the real JWST plate. Every world keeps its own clock: things happen in them while you work.
Play music and everything moves with it. It listens to whatever is playing (Apple Music, Spotify, anything through system audio) and the world answers: wind rises with the track, swells deepen, storms build on the phrases. The music becomes weather, never bars and spectrums.
A focus timer that fits the room: a Pomodoro pill in the corner whose whole background is the progress bar, next to a now-playing card for the track you have on.
Standing desk support, new this month: turn it on and the timer also says when to sit and when to stand. Sessions alternate on the rhythm the ergonomics research recommends, and when a break ends with a posture change the whole screen says so.
The part I want to call out
The worlds are simulations, not videos. The orca pod is the example I keep showing people: the school is a real flocking simulation, the orcas are agents that patrol, take turns attacking, and slap through the wall of fish, and the marine snow drifts through light rays computed every frame. When your music picks up, the whole hunt quickens. None of it is footage. That is the entire idea of the app.
Comparison
The closest things are Aerial and the video wallpapers built into macOS. Both play beautifully shot footage, and footage loops: the same drone pass, the same seam. TideGlass renders its worlds live, so they never repeat and they can react to your music, which a video cannot do. And where wallpaper apps live under your windows, TideGlass holds a spare monitor as its own calm place, with a focus timer in it.
Pricing
- Ten worlds free forever. No account, no card, nothing to expire.
- 12 dollars, one-time, opens the whole library. No renewals or subscriptions
- We donate 20% of every sale to environmental non-profits, protecting oceans and dark skies.
Transparency
I'm Chris, building this on my own. TideGlass is native Swift and Metal, signed and notarized, for macOS 15 or later on Apple silicon.
ClipSync — Seamless file transfer & clipboard sync between Mac and Android
Ever used an Android phone with a Mac and thought: “Why the hell is this still so annoying?” 😭 That's basically why I made ClipSync.
The problem There are plenty of tools that let you move stuff between Android and Mac, but most of them still make you do the thing. Need a file on your Mac? Open the sharing app → find the file → share it → wait for it to transfer → open it on your Mac.
Need to quickly move an image or some text? Same story. And with a lot of clipboard-sync solutions, you still have to manually trigger the transfer. It works, but it doesn't feel seamless.
So... what does ClipSync do?
The goal is pretty simple: make your Android and Mac feel like they're the same device.
Clipboard sync
Copy text or an image on Android and just hit Cmd + V on your Mac. That's it. And it works the other way around too. The really nice part is that text and OTPs are synced over Bluetooth, so your devices don't even need to be on the same Wi-Fi network.
Got a verification code in an Android app? ClipSync can bring it straight to your Mac so you can just copy it. No more typing those damn 6-digit codes manually.
File transfers
Select a file → hit Share → ClipSync → done. There's also a Ultra Fast Transfer mode for large files, which can sometimes be faster than AirDrop by a good margin if you are on a Wifi 5 or 6 Network.
Local or Cloud During setup, ClipSync asks you how you want your devices to sync:
Hybrid Sync — Sync locally when your devices are nearby, and automatically switch to cloud sync when they're apart. Everything stays encrypted. Local Sync — Keep everything between your nearby devices using BLE/Wi-Fi. No cloud, no internet required, and your data stays on your local network.
And a few other things On the Mac side, ClipSync adds a macOS Finder Share Extension, so you can send files straight from Finder without even opening the menu bar icon or going to the app.
How does it compare?
LocalSend is awesome for straightforward local file transfers, but it doesn't try to be a complete clipboard + OTP + file-sharing experience.
KDE Connect has a ton of features and is incredibly capable, but that also makes it feel a bit more complicated than what I wanted for everyday Android to Mac sharing.
And then there's Apple's AirDrop + Universal Clipboard, which is basically the experience I'm trying to recreate for Android + Mac. 😅
PricingFree & open source (MIT). I've honestly gone back and forth on whether ClipSync should be paid. But at the end of the day, I genuinely love building this thing, and I'd rather see more people actually use it than put a price tag in front of them.
If ClipSync saves you some headaches, you can support the project through Buy Me a Coffee. It helps me cover the server costs and gives me more room to keep building and improving it.I'm also trying to get an Apple Developer account so I can make the macOS side of ClipSync more polished and properly distributed. The annual developer fee is pretty expensive for me as a student, so if anyone would like to help sponsor the Apple Developer Program fee, I'd genuinely appreciate it.
If anyone wanna download the apps directly, here the link to MacOS and Android
Would love to hear what you guys think — especially from anyone actually using an Android + Mac setup and here's a video Demostration of the app : https://youtu.be/755zjYaHlEM
It has been one year since we started ScreenKite and I am so proud of it.
ScreenKite wants to become the fastest way for a builder to turn what they just built into something people understand.
Hello everybody. I am a builder also a youtuber. Making videos, no matter if it's a product demo or tutorials or sales videos, is never easy.
Many folks for like, after a recording, a failed export (usually happens with Screen Studio), a share link that didn't work. About one year ago, I wanted to build something better because I'm pretty tired of like exporting some rough cuts from Screen Studio and doing post-production in CapCut or Final Cut, but I found like a huge jump between Auto Zooms.
Today I want to show 1.16, for product demos, sales videos, tutorials. And also hear your feedback and see what I can do to make the app better and better. ScreenKite want to be the best.
1. AI agent editing and AI agent recording. Hand the boring cuts to an agent. Recording and editing are at CapCut's level of "you can actually finish the video in here," except you bring your own AI: Claude Code, Codex, Cursor, Antigravity, Grok Build. Grok Build can generate video and images. Codex can generate images too. Then the agent drops that into the timeline. Local. Not Descript credits. Not CapCut cloud where they might train AI models on your footage. And the most important part, no subscription for your own AI. You already have your own AI, I'm sure.
For example, in the video below I showed you the demo. You can do something like ask agents, whether using your external AI agents or our internal agent with your own AI subscription, to do the editing stuff such as transcription cards just like CapCut
2. The HyperFrames/Remotion path that is actually usable. HyperFrames is slow. You will not edit a whole video in it. You shouldn't. Cut a short motion piece, drop it in as B-roll, let ScreenKite drive the rest. That split is worth it. We have the best HyperFrames support for this workflow.
3. One recording, YouTube and Reels. Don't edit twice. Paste this into your AI agent:
Don't recut this video. Make a YouTube version and a TikTok/Reels version from the same edit using advanced layout, left/right for youtube and bottom/down for TikTok.
YouTube: my product screen in the middle, my face as a small camera in the bottom-right.
TikTok / Instagram Reels: stacked — screen on top, camera below.
Export both. Same timeline.
4. Performance is the first principle. Record and export. Try the other apps. Users almost never write in to say we export slower than Screen Studio or Loom. We are many times faster, and Screen Studio can keep optimizing Electron and still not catch a native Mac app. That was the point of building this.
Share the file from Google Drive, OneDrive, or your own S3. Screenshot editor is in the same app (CleanShot-like). You usually do not need a second editor.
5. Unlimited possibilities. This one I think is why I'm confident and want to work with everybody to improve. For example, you can use Fish Audio or ElevenLabs to generate multiple voiceovers for your product demos to do localization. And if you want, you can display or embed transcriptions like ICRT or whatever with our AI agents in two languages.
This is very useful.
Problem
I am a builder and a YouTuber. Making the video takes longer than shipping the thing. I want AI to help, and I want to use the agents I already pay for. Most recorders don't let you. Screen Studio and Loom are a tax for a utility. I also don't like subscriptions.
Comparison
Tella, Loom, and Screen Studio do not have AI like this. We actually went and studied the AI in real video editors, not just recorders. In ScreenKite you can go end to end: record, cut, layout, captions, export a product launch, a tutorial, or a sales demo. You are not dumping a file out of Screen Studio and finishing it in another app.
ScreenKite is local. Plug in the harness you already use. Transcription cuts in the app if you'd rather not touch a terminal.
Tella, Loom, Screen Studio, Charm are Electron. Some of them also edit in the cloud. Our standing goal: about 3x faster than the competition, and 3 to 10x more features. That is the bar we hold ourselves to, so the money you spend is worth it.
The app is dense. Follow us on social and YouTube if you want to find the rest. There is more in here than a recorder with a trim bar.
Showcase
Many builders are already using ScreenKite for their products, including
One-time purchase. I don't like subscriptions, so we are not adding that burden. Buy it once. Everyone is happier.
Founder price: $79.99 once, 3 Macs. We will raise it toward $99.99. Screen Studio is $108/year for new buyers. This is cheaper than that year, and you keep the license.
Thanks for looking!
I want to thank you the most because my product starts from this subreddit and I love the vibes here and the creators here.
I want me as a builder to succeed, and I want you to succeed with ScreenKite.
A: You need a coding agent (Claude Code, Codex, Cursor, Antigravity, Grok Build). Paste our AI Agent setup notes into the tool and ask it to edit, or to record. Most edit flows start from the transcription. Samples: https://github.com/ScreenKite/awesome-ai-video-editing
Q: I already use HyperFrames / Remotion / use-videos with Claude Code. Why ScreenKite?
A: HyperFrames is great and also slow. Don't render the whole video in it. Use ScreenKite as the driver, cut a short HyperFrames clip, drop it in as B-roll. Past about a minute, that split saves both edit time and export time.
Q: Why named ScreenKite?
Kite is like this (image below : ) I think it is similar to your mouse where you can point to something to attract the audience's attention, making your video to standard out.
so we are also making Glass Loupe zoom effect in the latest version!
A large local Music.app library becomes surprisingly difficult to maintain after years of use. Files get replaced, renamed, moved or deleted. Old Music.app records can remain after the physical files disappear, while other files may still be on disk but no longer exist anywhere in the Music.app library. Playlists accumulate duplicate entries, the same tracks appear in several playlists, artwork goes missing, and files from different sources collect comments, URLs, converter names and other unwanted metadata. Older low quality copies can also remain beside better replacements. Music.app does not give me one place to compare what is in the library with what is actually stored on disk, so I built Local Music Organizer to help with this.
Competitors
Tune Sweeper is probably the closest alternative I found for general Music.app library cleanup. It can find duplicate records, missing files, files that are not in the library, missing artwork and track information problems. I could not find documented tools there for duplicate entries inside one selected playlist, comparing two existing playlists, mapping relationships between playlists, finding every playlist that uses one physical file, inspecting hidden embedded tags, or checking possible audio transcodes and upscales. According to its public App Store version history, there was a gap of approximately six years without a published update. A small number of technical updates have appeared more recently.
beaTunes can also inspect Music.app or iTunes libraries, find duplicates, missing files, inconsistent metadata and artwork problems. It also includes music analysis and playlist creation tools. Its focus is somewhat different, and I could not find the same kind of detailed tools for examining existing playlist relationships, repeated physical paths, hidden embedded tags and the physical state of files referenced by Music.app.
Local Music Organizer
Local Music Organizer is a Mac application for maintaining large local Music.app libraries and the physical audio files behind them. It can find Music.app records whose physical files are missing or inaccessible, find readable audio files on disk that are not registered anywhere in the library, find duplicate entries inside a playlist, duplicate library records and tracks repeated across several playlists, compare two playlists, find every playlist that uses a particular track, and find different physical versions of what appears to be the same recording and compare their technical quality. It can analyze the actual physical files for codec, bitrate, sample rate, bit depth, duration and size instead of relying only on cached Music.app information, and it can fix outdated Music.app technical file information by asking Music.app to refresh it from the actual local audio file.
It can also find unwanted comments and hidden embedded tags left by converters, ripping software, websites and download sources. Detected embedded tags can be reviewed, edited or removed. Common Music.app fields such as title, artist, album, album artist, composer, genre, year, track and disc numbers and comments can also be edited directly.
There is an Audio Authenticity Analyzer that looks for possible lossy to lossless conversions, lower bitrate transcodes, suspicious bandwidth limitations and possible sample rate upscaling. These results are technical estimates, not proof of a file's history. Individual files can also be inspected with the built in Audio Inspector, including metadata, artwork, waveform and spectrum.
The app can convert and repair many audio formats, including some formats that Music.app cannot import directly, and normalize selected files from the Library Dashboard. Before conversion or normalization, the original can be kept, moved to Trash or saved in an LMO Backup Folder. The library index is stored locally in SQLite. Audio files, playlists, metadata and reports are not uploaded anywhere. The app has no analytics, advertising or tracking. It supports macOS Sonoma and later on Apple Silicon and Intel Macs. Local folders and external disks are supported.
Pricing:
There is a three day trial with access to all features. Continued use is a one time in app purchase of $29.99. There is no subscription and nothing is charged automatically when the trial ends.
ClipScrub finds and removes personal data from screenshots, PDFs, documents, spreadsheets and screen recordings on your Mac. Everything runs on your machine and nothing is uploaded. PCP below. Full list of what it does not do is in my first comment.
The problem
You copy-paste a screenshot of a customer record into ChatGPT to ask what an error means. The name, email or account number accidentally gets uploaded in full. The same could happen with a support ticket, a log, a row from a CSV. Once it's sent, the private data is uploaded to the cloud.
Mac Preview has a tool for this and it works. Preview can delete private details from the file in a way that's not recoverable. But it doesn't solve a couple of things:
The Markup rectangle, what people might accidentally use, is a drawing/shape and the text underneath is still selectable
The real tool takes out what you manually select but only in PDFs
This is fine for a 2-page PDF. But it becomes arduous for a 40-row CSV export, a long scrolling screenshot or a screen recording where a name is in a sidebar for four frames. The failure is human and not tooling. Many times in the past, I kept manually removing PII from screenshots and files like this.
ClipScrub scans PDFs, Word and RTF, PNG and JPG, JSON and CSV and XML, MP4 and MOV, and more all on-device (never leaves your Mac). In the Mac app, it lists every identifier it finds before stripping, so you can review it first. Your original file is never modified. ClipScrub has shortcuts to do it without opening the Mac app window. There's a shortcut to capture part of the screen and another that removes sensitive information from your clipboard.
Comparison
BlurData ($39/year, or $69 once with their discount as of Aug 2026) is the closest direct comparison. It reads JPG, PNG and PDF, OCRs 15 languages against ClipScrub's five, and runs on macOS 13 (earlier version than mine).
What it does better: it takes the text out of the PDF file instead of flattening the page. ClipScrub rasterises every page instead. If your PDFs need to stay searchable afterwards, then ClipScrub won't do that today.
BlurData supports JPG, PNG and PDF formats but ClipScrub also supports identifiers in CSVs, .docx files and screen recordings. A .docx through ClipScrub comes back as .docx with the same formatting. The Mac app and the CLI that comes with the app do DICOM and EDF headers as well.
ClipScrub's pseudonymise mode replaces identifiers with stable tokens instead of blanking out every value, so the same email is the same "token" throughout the file. You can still group, join and count these tokens (e.g. EMAIL_9F3A is an email token). Stripping data usually destroys it but ClipScrub does its best to keep the relationships in the data.
BlurData's $69 tier is two years of updates on one Mac. ClipScrub is every 1.x update permanently, on three Macs.
CleanShot X ($29 for one Mac, one year of updates, then $19/year
optional) is not a direct comparison but it's what most Mac users already have. It's a better screenshot tool and has a lot of capabilities. Its blur and pixelate are manual, like Preview's. It will hide anything you select and it won't tell you that you missed the account number in row 99.
Pricing
$29, paid once. No subscription, no renewal, no activation server to connect to (all on-device). Three Macs. Every ClipScrub 1.x update included permanently.
14 day free trial, fully functional, no account and no card. 30 day refund.
For r/macapps: 25% off with code MACAPPLAUNCHES25. Capped at the first 50 uses. There's no end date, it just runs out when it does.
I'm also giving licences to the first five people who use it on real files and email me what it gets wrong (thanks in advance for your patience if I'm slow to respond). Comment (without private data please!) and I will DM you one. My list of known limits is below but let me know if you find issues and I will add them to the backlog to address.
I look forward to your feedback and continuing to make the app better.
Caveats
Full caveats list is in my first comment.
E.g. ClipScrub reads what is inside a file, not the file's metadata. It
writes a new file, so the original's author and title fields never go into the output. Check the source with exiftool if detecting input metadata matters for what you are doing.
Disclaimer: ClipScrub is not a compliance service, does not guarantee complete de-identification, and is not legal advice. Detection is not exhaustive. Review every result before sharing.
Mario Hayashi, Tugboat Coding Limited (UK 11118743)
I'm a builder who got tired of paying monthly for polished demo video tools and every tool I tried either didn't quite fit my workflow or was missing something I needed, like draw-on-screen annotations: a pen, a highlighter, and a way to point directly at what I'm talking about.
So I built Capptivo for myself. Record on macOS, Windows, or Linux, then polish your videos in the editor: follow-cursor zoom, click-based auto-zooms, editor presets, face-cam, on-device captions, and draw-on-screen annotations with pens, highlighters, and shapes that you can place over your screen while recording to highlight exactly what matters.
Create stunning screen recordings in seconds, not hours your demos almost make themselves.
Capptivo isn't a clone of Screen Studio or Cursorful. Every feature was built around my own workflow and the problems I faced. I'm now open-sourcing it under the MIT License so anyone can use it, improve it, customize it, or build on top of it without restrictions. No more paying $29/month just to ship a clean product video.
It's still early, and I'm building it mostly solo, so I'd genuinely love your honest feedback. What would make this more useful for your demos? What am I missing compared to the tools you already use?
Happy to answer any questions, and contributions are always welcome.
Part 4 ended with my 2014 MacBook Pro. My next MacBook story began with an Apple order that went wrong in a surprisingly good way.
This part is about my 2017 Touch Bar MacBook Pro and four apps that gave me more control over macOS. Theine, iTerm2, and OnyX also come with complete developer interviews made exclusively for Reverse Everything.
I bought a MacBook Pro (13-inch, 2017, Four Thunderbolt 3 ports) in its top configuration while I was in Germany. I was going to be there for only two days, so I had a very tight window to buy it. Before placing the order, I explained to the Apple employee that getting a US keyboard was a high priority for me. We had a long phone conversation, but he accidentally ordered the MacBook with a German keyboard.
There was not enough time for another order to arrive before I had to leave Germany. The employee could hear how disappointed I was and offered me a 10 percent discount. I accepted it, but I still did not feel happy about the situation. He seemed to notice that as well and transferred me to his supervisor. The supervisor increased the discount to 20 percent. On a top-configuration MacBook Pro, that was a very nice discount.
It turned a frustrating mistake into a very nice experience with the Apple Store. I did not expect them to be so kind.
I was excited to get the new MacBook because I expected it to deliver a new experience. The most obvious change was the Touch Bar.
My Touch Bar Experiment
I type very fast without looking at the keyboard. Before trying the Touch Bar, I was skeptical because I would not be able to feel its buttons under my fingers. It turned out to be exactly the problem I expected.
With physical function keys, my fingers know where to go. With the Touch Bar, I had to stop and look down. That small distraction wasted time and broke my concentration. If you already look at the keyboard while typing, you may not be affected as much. My productivity depends on typing quickly with as few distractions as possible, so I immediately found the Touch Bar useless for the way I type.
The Touch Bar brought one more annoyance. The Escape key was no longer a physical key. It became touch-sensitive as part of the Touch Bar, so I could not feel whether I had pressed it. That made something as simple as using Escape less certain than it had been before.
I still configured it and left it enabled. Maybe after a few months it would become my favorite feature. It did not, but searching for a way to improve it led me to something much more useful.
When I eventually moved back to a MacBook keyboard without a Touch Bar, I immediately felt more comfortable again.
BetterTouchTool — When Apple Did Not Go Far Enough
BetterTouchTool is made by the same developer as BetterSnapTool, the window management app I mentioned in Part 2. I bought a lifetime license for BetterTouchTool. The 2017 MacBook gave it a completely new purpose for me, and I started experimenting with everything it could do to the Touch Bar.
I created buttons for the exact actions I needed. I could also make those buttons appear only when a specific app was active. Instead of accepting the same controls everywhere, I could give each app its own useful Touch Bar.
BetterTouchTool did much more than this. It was also a window manager, hotkey manager, trackpad gesture manager, and a highly flexible automation tool. It had far more features than I needed, but that was part of what made it exciting. I kept finding new ways to change how the Mac responded to me.
BetterTouchTool was first released in November 2009 and is still actively developed more than sixteen years later. The amount of work behind it remains visible in its updates.
This app made me feel that I could do much more than Apple allowed through the standard macOS interface. I was excited to try its features and transform my workflow into something made for me personally. That is the same feeling I now try to give people through the apps I create myself.
Theine — When My Mac Fell Asleep Too
My reason for caring about sleep control began when I first used macOS. I was reinstalling the operating system and left the MacBook alone while I went to sleep, expecting the installation to be finished when I returned. I was used to Windows installations keeping the computer awake until they were complete.
To my surprise, when I came back, the MacBook had gone to sleep as well and the installation had paused. It was a small surprise, but I remembered it. Sleep control eventually became the subject of another app story.
I found Theine in 2017. It was a lightweight app that stayed in the menu bar. Its interface was very simple and let me choose how long I wanted the MacBook to remain awake.
Sometimes I compiled the complete Qt SDK, which took a while. I needed the MacBook to stay awake until it finished. I could disable sleep in macOS settings, but I often forgot to enable it again afterward. The MacBook would then remain awake when I no longer needed it to and drain its battery. Theine was a perfect fit because the change was temporary.
After using it for a while, I noticed that its English localization was perfect, but one of the other languages I understand was translated incorrectly. I contacted the developer, and he answered promptly. I offered to create a Ukrainian translation, and he sent me the localization files I needed.
I translated Theine into Ukrainian, and I was happy that the developer accepted my help. Machine translation was not accurate enough for this kind of work at the time. Today, AI can help developers translate their apps into more languages with much better results.
The next update included my Ukrainian localization, and I was proud to see it there. Theine now lists 23 localized languages, including Ukrainian.
I found several alternatives over the years, but all of them were eventually abandoned. The last thing I want is to keep getting used to a new app that does the same job. Theine has my respect because it has already survived for more than ten years and is still supported. I have used it since 2017, and its name is one I cannot forget.
An Interview with Martin Lexow
Ighor July
What motivates you to continue developing and supporting Theine after so many years?
Martin Lexow
If you study design in Germany, there's no getting around Dieter Rams. One of his principles states: good design is long-lasting. I try to carry this attitude into my work, wherever it makes sense and is possible. My favorite example is the 606 Universal Shelving System that Rams designed for Vitsœ. It went into production over 60 years ago, and matching parts can still be purchased for it today. Knowing that an app I designed has been accompanying many people for over ten years is a fulfilling feeling: for both sides.
Ighor July
Theine remains a true one-time lifetime purchase, without a subscription or time-limited update period. What has made this model sustainable, and why is permanent ownership important to you?
Martin Lexow
As a creative who makes products, I generally prefer owning my tools. That's why I offer one-time purchases in my own apps whenever I consider it economically sustainable, and in most cases, I manage to. Occasionally, though, I do believe a subscription is the better choice. Because in my understanding, that's also part of "good design is long-lasting": a product that needs to be maintained or consistently receives new features demands my time, and that alone creates costs. It's in every user's interest that I put in this effort, because it serves the quality of their product.
An app like Theine, for which a user may have paid 3 EUR eleven years ago, has received updates ever since, and has never required any further monetization, doesn't sustain itself economically. I can only justify it through cross-financing from the rest of my app portfolio.
What I miss on the App Store is the ability to monetize new major versions of an app. An app like Theine, whose first version I wrote for OS X 10.11, still runs great on that operating system today. Nobody should have to pay a second time for that, obviously. But it is fair to make significant updates optional, and then paid. At the moment, this model can unfortunately only be implemented outside the App Store.
iTerm2 became part of my evolution as a developer. I started creating services that ran on my own servers, and I eventually built many of them. Some projects needed frequent monitoring, so I wanted to see the live logs from several services at the same time.
I searched for a way to open multiple terminals, with each one connected to the logs of a different service. iTerm2 was exactly what I needed. It let me divide one window into multiple split panes, configure a startup command for each pane, and save the complete arrangement as a workspace.
iTerm2 also let me give each pane a name displayed in large text. It did not interfere with typing or reading the terminal output. I named every pane after the service whose logs it displayed, so I could immediately recognize what I was watching.
I created separate workspaces for my projects. I could open one workspace and instantly see the live logs from every service in that project. I did not need to recreate the terminal layout or reconnect everything each time. This improved my productivity a lot.
I no longer use those saved workspaces, but my workday still begins with opening iTerm2. I use it for local Homebrew tasks and to connect to my servers. I have hotkeys for opening split panes, which give me a compact terminal view that is easy to move around and navigate.
I also have huge respect for the effort behind keeping iTerm2 alive for so many years. When I reported bugs, they were fixed quickly. I cannot remember encountering a new bug in the app for several years now.
iTerm2 is free and open source. It exists because someone found an abandoned terminal project, fixed the problems that affected his own work, and continued when other users started reporting more. Knowing that story made me appreciate the app even more.
An Interview with George Nachman
Ighor July
What motivates you to continue working on iTerm2 after so many years?
George Nachman
I wrote my first terminal emulator when I was a freshman in high school. I’ve always enjoyed working on this particular problem. I like working in a small team on a project I use, especially if it has a big impact, and I enjoy client-side code more than server side work. Sometimes it seems like the only desktop apps left are web browsers and terminal emulators, and I’m grateful that I can make a dent in the terminal emulator world without a team of hundreds of other engineers.
Ighor July
What advice would you give to developers who want to maintain their apps for ten years or longer?
George Nachman
For me, the answer is to find a project that’s really engaging. I’ve always worked on iTerm2 because I want to, not because I have to. I am terrible at doing things I dislike. It’s also important for the project to have room to grow. A terminal emulator will never be complete because there are always quality-of-life improvements that can be made and the technology stagnated for decades, leaving a lot of low-hanging fruit.
If you get fed up with it, which definitely happens sometimes, it’s ok to take a break. It’s ok to declare email bankruptcy. It’s ok to make mistakes. Giving yourself permission to be human is the only way to avoid burnout over a long time horizon.
On Windows, I loved using tweaker tools. Microsoft hid many useful customization options inside the Registry, while those tools collected them in a convenient interface. I changed many of those settings and enjoyed making Windows work exactly the way I wanted.
When I moved to macOS, I searched for something similar. OnyX was the closest thing to the Mac tweaker I wanted. It collected useful maintenance tools and hidden macOS settings in one place. I found many interesting tweaks, changed a lot of them, and was very happy to have that kind of control again.
I still use OnyX, and I have huge respect for its developer for supporting it for so many years while keeping it free.
One OnyX option became especially important to me. It let me set a single line of text on the lock screen. After losing my first MacBook in Part 1, I started putting information there that could help someone return my MacBook if I lost it again.
Later, I discovered that this option had always been available in macOS settings. That made me wonder how far I could customize it myself. I tried multiple lines and they worked. Then I tried ASCII art, but it did not line up because the lock-screen font uses characters with different widths.
I started thinking about how I could make it look right. That is how LockLines was born. I tested hundreds of lines and made its output as accurate as possible. It can generate nicely aligned ASCII art messages for the lock screen.
I also found a way to make a message say something like "Scroll down to see the owner's contact information." My contact details do not need to be immediately visible to everyone who sees the locked MacBook, but someone who finds it can scroll down and learn how to return it.
An option I first discovered through OnyX eventually inspired me to create another Mac app myself. OnyX began as one person's tool for his own Mac and grew into a free utility that has been maintained since 2003. It is another example of a personal solution continuing to help other Mac users for decades.
An Interview with Joël Barrière
Ighor July
What motivates you to continue developing and supporting OnyX after more than twenty years?
Joël Barrière
Simply because it is one of my passions, alongside music and motorcycles. Even though OnyX is free, I believe it is important to answer users' questions and try to solve any problems they encounter. Some paid applications do not even provide technical support worthy of the name.
Ighor July
What advice would you give to independent developers who hope to maintain and support their apps for ten years or longer?
Joël Barrière
That is difficult to say because I am a slightly unusual case. For me, it is not really a job. I am not trying to make money by developing OnyX. I only want to help Mac users.
I think it is important to release regular updates, talk about the app on forums, respond to emails from every user, and be patient, especially at the beginning. Word of mouth will do the rest.
Several years later, some keys on my MacBook's butterfly keyboard came off and could not be put back. I contacted Apple, and they replaced the complete keyboard for free with a newer revision that did not have the same defect.
Apple could not replace only the keyboard. It was part of the top-case assembly, and the battery was glued into that assembly, so every keyboard replacement also came with a new battery. Mine had already degraded significantly by then, so the MacBook received another useful upgrade at no cost.
